On Saturday, Carbon Arc has a special presentation of The Stairs, “a work with deep compassion for those who’ve made their way back from the depths of addiction.” A documentary shot over several years that examines the lives of habitual drug users in Toronto’s Regent Park, it won Best Canadian Film of 2016 from the Toronto Film Critics Association. This screening features a post-film Q&A with director Hugh Gibson, hosted by Natasha Pace from Global TV and featuring Nova Scotia Chief Medical Officer Dr. Robert Strang.

Fundy Cinema in Wolfville has a great documentary pick as well this Wednesday, with the “instantly recognizable masterpiece” Dawson City: Frozen Time, a film which is partly about the discovery in the Yukon of several hundred reels of nitrate film from the 1910s and ’20s, decades after they were presumed permanently lost, but has much more to tell about those early decades of the 20th century. “You don’t just watch Dawson City,” Owen Gleiberman wrote in Variety, “You step into it to and draw back a magical curtain on the past, entering a world of buried memory that’s the precursor to our own.”

Another film from my 2017 top ten, The Florida Project, also has Wolfville screenings on Sunday.

Carbon Arc programs its first feature-length film of its winter-spring season this Friday with the African sensation Fèlicité, Senegal’s nominee for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Feature, and winner of the Berlinale’s Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize, best film at FESPACO 2017 (Africa’s biggest film festival), and six Africa Movie Academy Awards (a new record). Alain Gomis’ cinematic style is “spectacularly multifaceted” (says the New York Times), and its title character’s arc shows a sophisticated understanding of female strength (says TIFF programmer extraordinaire Kiva Reardon).

I haven’t noted any Wolfville screenings for a while, but it is worth singling out this Sunday’s Fundy Cinema screenings of The Other Side of Hope, one of the best reviewed films of 2017, and one that seems to have broadened the appeal of the standout Finnish film director Aki Kaurismäki, a man who in the ongoing crisis of global migration seems to have found his moment. Before that, on Wednesday, Fundy has the Cannes Palme D’Or winner (and a good shout to pick up the Foreign Language Oscar), The Square.

Cineplex’s annual Flashback Film Fest continues through Thursday with more films than I can list here—I’ve included a handful below (nighthawk action fans who haven’t yet checked out the 3D conversion of Terminator 2: Judgment Day—”entirely supervised, frame-by-frame, by [James] Cameron” should definitely consider Tuesday’s late screening). My highest recommendations this week for your trip to the multiplex continue to be Oscar nominees Phantom Thread and Call Me by Your Name.

There is a good crop of free screenings again this week:

Monday, the successful doc Blackfish, which tells the story of Tilikum, an orca held by SeaWorld, and the controversy over captive killer whales, wraps up a three-part film series with expert-led panel discussions called “Pushing Boundaries: What We Owe Other Animals,” organized by Novel Tech Ethics at the Central Library.

Saturday, the North Memorial Library continues its African History Month screenings with Ava DuVernay’s wide-ranging doc 13th, while the Central Library joins the month’s observance with the well-regarded 2017 film Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary.

Also kicking off this Friday at Park Lane is Cineplex’s annual Flashback Film Fest, which as usual is a mixed bag of pop classics that includes a few gems. Friday’s kickoff has The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day back to back in the afternoon, as well as an evening double feature of Coen brothers comedies—Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski. Sunday sees some Super Bowl counter-programming with David Lynch’s still-divisive adaptation of Dune and the recently restored Jackie Chan kung-fu nugget Drunken Master. Family classic The Iron Giant has a matinee early Sunday afternoon.

As if that weren’t enough, Cineplex has two top-drawer film classics as well. Friday at Park Lane, it’s Powell & Pressburger’s sublime 1946 fantasy-war-romance film, A Matter of Life and Death—”its strangeness makes it a masterpiece.” (So far there is just one scheduled screening but perhaps more will be added. Update:more added!) And Sunday afternoon at Park Lane and Dartmouth Crossing, it’s Stanley Donen’s stylish, Hitchcock-inflected 1963 comedy thriller Charade, with an awkwardly-old Cary Grant and a dazzling, Givenchy-clad Audrey Hepburn delivering “the last sparkle of Hollywood.”

This week’s embarrassment of cinematic riches includes many excellent free screenings as well:

Thursday, Carsten Knox intros the latest in the Central Library series of Wes Anderson films, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, “still the black sheep of Anderson’s filmography.” As well, the volunteer-run community art space Modulating Mansion has Margarethe Von Trotta’s 1981 film Marianne and Juliane, which looks at the Cold War period in Germany not on the East side but, critically, in the West.

The Central Library Wes Anderson retrospective continues this week with Zack Miller introducing Bottle Rocket on Thursday and a make-up edition on Sunday of the previously stormed-out screening of Rushmore, introduced by Kendra Barnes.

Blade Runner 2049 will be released on various optical disc formats next week so tonight’s (Monday’s) screening at Park Lane is probably your last chance to see it on the big screen for some time to come.

I finally saw The Shape of Water and I really enjoyed it, more than perhaps I expected and definitely enough to recommend it here. But I honestly just don’t get Guillermo del Toro’s fixation on gore. By his standards, there isn’t much of it here, but there are still a couple of gross-out moments that serve no narrative purpose that I can see—they just add a directorial signature.

I usually only add films to my “recommended” list if I feel I can do so without significant reservation, but I’m adding Molly’s Game only because I really enjoyed the first two thirds of the film so much that the lapse into awkward dadsplaining in the final third didn’t ruin it for me. Reading various women’s responses to the film has been interesting—some like April Wolfe feel that the merits of the first two acts are decisive, while others like Manohla Dargis feel that the whole enterprise is undermined—I find myself alternately entertaining both perspectives.

This time of year I typically post up a list of some of the best films of the year that are already streaming on Netflix. Unfortunately the shift that Netflix has undergone to proprietary content, among other factors, seems to have resulted in a smaller such crop this year. So instead I offer you a more conventional list—my ten favourite films of 2017.

8. Lady Bird“You might think you’ve seen this all before. You probably have, but never quite like this,” said A.O. Scott in the NY Times, which encapsulates well how I feel about this film. It’s been weeks since I saw it and the characters are still with me. As a piece of cinema, what impressed me the most was the tight pacing and editing—first-time director Greta Gerwig seems to have a knack for picking just the right small moments to represent larger swathes of narrative.

7. The Florida ProjectSean Baker’s “brilliant, buoyant, and ultimately heart-wrenching” follow-up to the remarkable debut Tangerine seemingly draws a dash or two of inspiration from The 400 Blows and strikingly takes the point of view of its youngest characters in its timely portrayal of impoverished residents of a Florida welfare hotel on the outskirts of Disney World.

4. Call Me By Your Name
All it took was a gem of a script of from the master himself, James Ivory, to unlock the full potential of the director Luca Guadagnino. Everyone is talking about Michael Stulhbarg’s remarkable speech as the scene that takes it over the top, but the film really won me over with its wonderful dialog that joyously bounces from English to French to Italian, and back again. The partners in the central romance, played by Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer, perhaps look respectively younger and older than the 17 and 24 years of age specified by the script, but the charm here is irresistible and I bought in fully.

2. Faces Places (Visages Villages)
This deserving winner of the TIFF People’s Choice Documentary Award is a remarkable collaboration between veteran filmmaker Agnès Varda, now 89 and, as the film documents, experiencing diminished vision and mobility, and the giant-photo-wall-pasting activist artist JR. It is genuinely touching, irresistibly funny, and grounded in the weight of experience—and still somehow free. There was no other festival film this year that I can so confidently recommend to absolutely everyone.

1. Zama
The most opaque and complex film I saw at TIFF was also unquestionably the year’s best, for me. Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel has finally returned nine years on from The Headless Woman with her most ambitious feature yet. With its incredible sound design and elaborate reconstruction of indigenous cultures wiped out centuries ago, this stylized, sophisticated head-trip of a colonial period piece strikes me as a film I will return to again and again in years to come—but maybe not before reading the novel on which it is based, recently, belatedly made available in English translation. I’m seeing evidence that the film’s release to theatres in the USA has been delayed (perhaps due to it not making the Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar?) but hopefully soon more people will have the chance to experience it. (Toronto peeps, note that it will be screening at the Lightbox in February again, along with her acclaimed Salta trilogy La Ciénaga, The Holy Girl, and The Headless Woman.)

Perennial seasonal downer-upper It’s a Wonderful Life is back for daily screenings for the next few days, which provides you with the opportunity to compare and contrast with Neptune’s production of the stage adaptation.